cooking

The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to then create from them a new order. We butcher, grind, chop, grate, mince, and liquefy raw ingredients, breaking down formerly living things so that we might recombine them in new, more cultivated forms. When you think about it, this is the same rhythm, once removed, that governs all eating in nature, which invariably entails the destruction of certain living things, by chewing and then digestion, in order to sustain other living things. In The Hungry Soul Leon Kass calls this the great paradox of eating: “that to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form.” If there is any shame in that destruction, only we humans seem to feel it, and then only on occasion. But cooking doesn’t only distance us from our destructiveness, turning the pile of blood and guts into savory salami, it also symbolically redeems it, making good our karmic debts: Look what good, what beauty, can come of this! Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter – this quantity of sacrificed life – just before the body takes its first destructive bite.

Michael Pollan

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Large Print Press), Pages: 405

Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

A Hundred Years From Now Tell me friend, what will it matter, say a hundred years from now, if you owned a thousand acres or just one old broken plow; If you bought your suits in Paris and your shoes in Italy, Or your clothes were made in patches, like the bed quilts use to be? Whether you lived in a mansion with the finest broadlooms laid, If you had a private chauffeur, Butler, cook, a nurse and maid. Or you lived in a cottage with your health gone on the skids, out of work and out of money just your wife and seven kids. Sure, on earth there makes a difference what we've got and who we know, Whether we are poor and hungry, or we're rolling in the dough And if life down here was only all there was and that was it, then it sure would make a difference for all of us, I must admit. But there there's more to life than livin', more for those who will believe, more in store laid up in heaven if the Saviour we receive. Whether we are lost for ever or to Jesus here we bow, This is what will make a difference in a hundred years from now.

Winny and I lived in a house that ran on static electricity. . . . If you wanted to run the blender, you had to rub balloons on your head. If you wanted to cook, you had to pull off a sweater real quick.